Third-party identity services

Identity as a service is predominantly provided by third-party service providers. It may include all the processes, such as identification, authentication, authorization, and accountability, or some of them. Similarly, such services may include activities such as enrollment, provisioning, and deprovisioning.

Some of the identity services that may be offered by third-party service providers include the following:

• Single Sign-on services: When a user needs to access many different resources that have similar authentication requirements and varying authorization polices, then Single Sign-On (SSO) services provide seamless access to such additional resources, without the user needing to provide credentials at each of the resource access. For example, assume that a user is first authenticated in a website called abc.com, and then he traverses to another website called xyz.com. Since xyz.com also requires user authentication, the site may ask for user credentials again...